Fear

For the Lord your God has not given you a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7

This verse has been branded in my mind for many years now. It has been with me in some of the hardest times of my life, and been with me in the trivial moments. The day I heard my mother had cancer, I prayed this verse over and over. Today when I got my vaccinations to go to Mauritius, I prayed this verse.

It means more than "I am not afraid..." This verse means that God did not intend for me to have fear in my spirit. King David said that God knew him when He formed David in his mother's womb, that He knew David when He knit together his flesh, and that applies to each of us. God knew us as we were forming, he shaped us, building us into the people he wants us to be; and as he was shaping and building us, he designed us with a spirit of power, love and a sound mind... not a spirit of fear.

This isn't to say that God never meant you to have fear. You can be afraid without having a spirit of fear. If you are standing face to face with a lion, and there isn't a plexiglass wall between you and that lion, you should probably have some natural fear in that moment. If you are in a plane that just lost two of its four engines, a bit of fear makes sense.

That said, you can conquer that fear. You can rise up above it and continue on doing what needs to be done.

Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, ^a]">[a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me. Psalm 23:4

This is another Psalm of David, and another verse about fear that has spoken to me for many years. David knew a lot about the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He was a mighty warrior from his days as a shepherd that fought lions and bears to his days as the head of Israel's army.

In this Psalm, David says that God's rod and staff comfort him. To the modern ear, that doesn't make much sense. Take a moment, and think like a semi-nomadic shepherd, and it will make more sense. The shepherd's staff was the tool he used to guide his sheep. We see them in cartoons with the long hook on the top. Shepherds really used that hook to grab sheep that had gone astray, or to lift a sheep out of a crevasse that it had fallen into. It was the shepherd's rescue tool. The rod, however, was the shepherd's offensive tool. It was a club made of stout, hard, wood, that could be used to bash the head of a predator or a thief.

David is saying that he knows God has the tools both to defend him from threats and to rescue him if he gets into something he can't get himself out of; we have that same assurance. God has the tools to defend us from any threat, and the tools to rescue us should we get into something over our heads. That fact is such a comfort to me. I can keep living my life, trying new things leaping into the void, looking for God's will, knowing that if I jump off a cliff but don't make it to the other side, God can lift me out of that pit and put me back with the other sheep.